What has been the traditional Christian attitude to circumcision?

The readiness with which those eager to fight disease are willing to sacrifice part of the penis is partly an effect of the popular idea that the foreskin is of no importance to any bodily function and thus that its destruction is not really any sacrifice at all. (For two millennia of contrary evidence, click here. ) This in turn is connected with assertions that the western world has not valued the foreskin and that Christianity has traditionally endorsed or at least had a neutral attitude to circumcision. Although they appear regularly in medical journals and popular articles on circumcision, these claims are false. Until the arrival of Islam in the eighth century, the only Mediterranean, European and Asian societies to practise circumcision were the Jews and the Arabs. The Greeks and the Romans admired the normal male body, and abhorred circumcision so strongly that they made several attempts to ban it. (1)

Although Christianity began as a Jewish sect, it soon outgrew its parent, and in the process abandoned and then grew steadily more hostile to the rite. St Paul determined that circumcision was not necessary for converts, and the Church Fathers declared that Christ’s sacrifice had removed the need for further shedding of blood; baptism had replaced cutting as the appropriate initiation for members of the church. (2) There was a good deal of controversy at first, St Ambrose observing in the fourth century that "many persons are disturbed over the question … why circumcision should have been made an obligation under the ruling of the Old Testament, and set aside as useless by the teaching of the New Testament", (3) but by that time the church had passed a law which stated that "Roman citizens who suffer that they themselves or their slaves be circumcised … are exiled perpetually to an island and their property confiscated; the doctors suffer capital punishment". (4) Thomas Aquinas formally restated the Christian ban on circumcision in the Summa, but the peak of the Catholic Church’s opposition was probably reached in the Bull of Union with the Copts (1442) which prohibited circumcision outright and declared that it "cannot possibly be observed without loss of eternal salvation". (5) Even a humanist such as Erasmus, neither a bigot nor an anti-Semite, placed circumcision among the Jewish customs on which "we cry shame". (6)

To most Englishmen, circumcision was a threat from which they had been saved by the defeat of Islamic armies. For Edward Gibbon, the prospect that "the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet" was the greatest of the "calamities" from which Charlemagne delivered Europe. (7) In the seventeenth century some servants of the East India Company deserted to the Mughals in the hope of a better career path, and in 1649 a company official sadly reported the defection of one Josiah Blackwell, who "most wickedly and desperately renounced his Christian faith and professed himself a Moor, was immediately circumcised, and is irrecoverably lost". (8) Forced conversions were more common than voluntary, however – the fate of several hundred British soldiers captured after the Battle of Pollilur in 1780, who were circumcised and enslaved by Tipu Sultan of Mysore. One ensign recorded his shame in bitter yet revealing terms:

"I lost with the foreskin of my yard all those benefits of a Christian and Englishman which were and ever shall be my greatest glory". (9)

The teenage James Bristow and his mates were so distressed at what had been done to them that they caught and circumcised dogs, knowing that this would incense their captors because Moslems regard dogs as unclean. The action brought further punishment, but Bristow felt it justified because "compelling us to undergo an abhorred operation [was] so base and barbarous an act of aggression, that it was impossible to reflect on it with temper". (10)

As a Christian country, England had no history of circumcision before the late nineteenth century, but there were strong "Judaizing" tendencies in Puritanism, as fundamentalist radicals turned to the Old Testament in their quest to purge Christianity of its popish accretions. Some of these went so far as to adopt Jewish customs such as Sabbath and dietary observance, and a few even tried to circumcise boys – for which offence a certain Anne Curtyn was gaoled in 1649. (11) These impulses were revived in a number of utopian/millenarian sects which flourished during the turbulence of the Industrial Revolution, including the puritanical followers of John Wroe (1782-1863), one of whose disciples was prosecuted for manslaughter in 1824, after a boy he had circumcised in Bedford died from the wound. (12) Despite these examples of enthusiasm, the overwhelming English attitude was horror, and in Tristram Shandy Lawrence Sterne used a threat of circumcision to titillate his readers’ sense of dread, and to emphasise the failings of Shandy senior as a father. (13) In his critique of artificial efforts to improve upon nature, John Bulwer followed the lead of Renaissance anatomists such as da Carpi and Falloppio in condemning circumcision as unnatural and emphasising the role of the foreskin in normal sexual functioning:

That part which hangeth over the end of the foreskin, is moved up and down in coition, that in this attrition it might gather more heat, and increase the pleasure of the other sexe; a contentation of which they [the circumcised] are defrauded by this injurious invention. For, the shortnesse of the prepuce is reckoned among the organical defects of the yard, … yet circumcision detracts somewhat from the delight of women, by lessening their titillation. (14)

In her popular midwifery manual Jane Sharp wrote that a few people believed that the "Venerious action" might be performed better without the foreskin, but pointed out that circumcision had been forbidden by St Paul and hoped that

no man will be so void of reason and Religion, as to be Circumcised to make trial which of these two opinions is the best; but the world was never without some mad men, who will do anything to be singular: were the foreskin any hindrance to procreation or pleasure, nature had never made it, who made all things for these very ends and purposes. (15)

When, in the 1870s, Richard Burton remarked that Christendom "practically holds circumcision in horror", (16) the observation was ceasing to be true, but it was certainly the case before Victorian doctors sought to reconfigure the phallus. How odd that some well-meaning medical researchers today should still be treading in their footsteps.

"You cannot condemn the ways of Europe for not being those of Tahiti, nor our ways for not being those of Europe. You need a more dependable scale of judgment than that. And what shall it be? Do you know a better one than general welfare and individual utility?"

-- Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage

Introduction

During the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth three great Islamic empires, each more powerful and far wealthier than any European state, held sway over a vast territory in Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and parts of south-eastern Europe. The Ottomans controlled the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, the Safavids ruled Persia and parts of what is now Afghanistan, and the Mughals struggled to hold India against recalcitrant Hindu kingdoms and rival Moslem sultanates in the south. In North Africa the regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers were formally subject to but increasingly autonomous from the Sublime Porte, while the powerful Sultan of Morocco, controlling the vital Straits of Gibraltar, was fiercely independent and pursued his own course. An important part of the economy of these four regimes derived from plunder of European shipping in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and the regimes maintained large corsair fleets for this purpose. Successive Islamic dynasties had been the dominant Middle Eastern power for a thousand years; and although the seventeenth century marked the height of Ottoman expansion and the eighteenth century the beginning of the end, it was not apparent to contemporaries that they were in terminal decline or that defeat outside the walls of Vienna in 1683 or acceptance of the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 – which recognized the loss of European territory and acknowledged other powers as equal states – were anything more than temporary setbacks. In the early stages of the Enlightenment radical thinkers such as Spinoza cited the might of Islam and the extent of its dominions as evidence that universal Christianity might not be the world’s divinely appointed destiny, and as late as the 1750s Voltaire commented that nothing very positive had emerged from years of constant warfare with the crescent: “The Christian powers have lost a great deal to the Turks within these five centuries [i.e. since the Crusades], and have scarcely gained anything from each other.” [1]

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed a slow shift in the balance of power between East and West, the decline of all the Islamic empires, and the rise of Britain as the world’s pre-eminent power – eclipsing the former maritime empires of Spain, Portugal, and Holland, and limiting France to a peripheral role. Between the Ottoman defeat at Vienna and the 1840s, when its decline was so apparent that the Czar could dub it “the sick man of Europe,” the stand-off between the European and Moslem worlds was not unlike the Cold War between the West and the Soviet bloc from the late 1940s to the 1980s. The major powers avoided direct conflict, but there was continual confrontation and skirmishing at the periphery, where the great tectonic plates rubbed together; and for two hundred years the major earthquake zones were southern Russia, North Africa, and India. As in the Cold War, defection and imprisonment were prominent features of the interaction between the two systems. The vivid parable with which Linda Colley chooses to illustrate the themes of her absorbing study is not an obvious story of conquest and domination like Robinson Crusoe, but Swift’s jaundiced satire Gulliver’s Travels, in which the hero is captured, bound and exhibited by tiny Lilliputians, enslaved by gigantic Brobdingnagians, and finally won over by the equine Houyhnhnms, whose natures seem so much more noble than his own that he yearns to become one of them and ends up rejecting his own society. In different ways and to differing degrees one or other of these experiences were those of Colley’s captives, Daniel Vitkus’ escapees, and William Dalrymple’s officers and gentlemen. They languished in prison, toiled for Moslem masters, converted in the hope of improving their lot, escaped to tell the tale of how they remained steadfast to their native country and its faith, deserted to the American Indians to avoid the floggings and brutality of the British army, or fell in love with dusky Mughal beauties and found themselves pawns in a marital intrigue orchestrated by the surprisingly canny women of the zenana.

The Barbary Corsairs

From the late sixteenth century to the early nineteenth, state-sponsored privateers from North African ports preyed on European shipping and even raided coastal villages in England and Ireland, from which they captured men, women, and children for sale in slave markets. Over the centuries tens of thousands of seamen, traders, travelers, and miscellaneous others were sold into slavery, many spending years in captivity before managing to raise a ransom or, less frequently, escape. Some escapees wrote narratives of their ordeals. Many, such as the seven meticulously edited and annotated by Daniel Vitkus, are extraordinary records of cultural interaction, human adaptability, and sheer endurance. Placed in context by Nabil Matar’s deeply-researched introduction, the narratives range in style from short summaries telling us about the writer’s religious faith and gratitude for deliverance to lengthy and informative accounts of the manners and customs of the Moors – for example, the remarkable memoir by Joseph Pitts, who was probably the first westerner to visit the shrines of Mecca and Medina, and certainly the first known to have survived to tell the tale. Only fifteen when captured at sea in 1678, Pitts spent fifteen years in captivity under a succession of masters, some brutal and some kind, converted to Islam under duress from one of the former sort, was freed from slavery by one of the latter, and eventually managed to escape while on a trip to Smyrna. Even then his misfortunes were not at an end: after a year’s struggle getting back to England, he was immediately kidnapped by a press gang for service in the Royal Navy and saved from another stretch of captivity only by the intervention of a local gentleman. Britons might have sung they never would be slaves, but various forms of forced labor remained common in Europe and America until well into the nineteenth century: assignment of convicts in Australia, black slavery in the USA, serfdom in Russia, and impressed service in the British Navy could all be compared with slavery in North Africa –not necessarily to the advantage of the West. The galleys of Spain, France, Venice, and Genoa were also manned by slaves.

The common British expression “Turning Turk” signified a crossing-over rather like defection to Moscow during the Cold War. Many did so under pressure; but others chose to convert to Islam and work for the Moors out of choice because it improved their lot in life: conditions for the average laborer in war-torn Europe for much of the period were so grim that many chose to remain with their captors because they offered better chances of prosperity and happiness. A surprisingly large number of the privateers who seized European human and material cargo were captained by renegade Christians who found service with the crescent more rewarding than that with the cross. Matar writes that there were as many as 25,000 captives in Morocco around 1700 and suggests that most lived in relatively comfortable conditions and produced a cosmopolitan mingling of cultures showing greater tolerance for religious diversity than in most European centres, and certainly far more relaxed than in places where the Inquisition was still rooting out heresy. Such a benign picture may be a trifle overdrawn, since Christians and Jews, even if not slaves, were second-class citizens in Moslem countries, with restricted civil rights and only limited tolerance. Joseph Pitts commented that Algerian masters rarely forced slaves to convert because it would reduce the likelihood of ransom, but also that turning Turk did not necessarily mean release from bondage, or even better treatment as a slave.

The North African states had a heavy demand for skilled labour, particularly gunners, seamen, carpenters, bricklayers, and other builders. To ascertain why they preferred to obtain them by capturing foreigners instead of training locals and why slavery and plunder were such vital parts of the economy is beyond the scope of these studies; but those questions are relevant to the scenario of western advance and Islamic decline. Colley suggests that the demand for foreign workers was generated largely by depopulation arising from repeated epidemics of plague that reduced the population of Algiers from 100,000 in the early seventeenth century to only 40,000 by 1800. This is a dramatic decline, particularly at a time when the populations of most European countries were growing rapidly; but such a desperate collapse might need the operation of other factors, such as economic stagnation, failures in the education system, and chronic political instability. It is interesting to compare the recognizably similar but more complex picture today, when vast numbers of unskilled workers from countries such as Turkey and Algeria are employed in low-level jobs in France and Germany, while such oil rich states as Saudi Arabia fly in expensive westerners to manage oil-extraction and medical care. Perhaps the enslavement of captives was an expedient in the days before immigration and the guest worker.

Forced circumcision

A major sub-theme in the encounters recorded in these texts is the embarrassing fact of male circumcision. Islam was (and remains) the world’s largest circumcising culture, while Christianity had demarcated itself from its Judaic parent by decisively rejecting the rite and declaring its belief in the resurrection of the body with all the bits complete and unabridged. Meetings between two such opposed attitudes were sure to provoke sparks, and one of the deepest fears of Christians taken captive by Barbary pirates was that they would be circumcised as part of a forced conversion. Matar remarks that there were cases of forced conversion involving circumcision and that contemporary observers referred to the practice in general terms, but he provides no evidence from eyewitness accounts. Joseph Pitts agreed to convert after repeated beatings, but he does not reveal whether he was subsequently circumcised. He gives the impression that all that needed to be done when converting under compulsion was to make a declaration of faith and that it was only those who went over voluntarily who were required to take part in elaborate initiation ceremonies; but it is possible that the proceedings were so terrible and humiliating for him that he could not bear to refer to them. Vitkus, on the other hand, suggests elsewhere that the fear of circumcision was the result of exaggerated representations in plays and other popular literature, and that “for those who became Muslims in order to join the Barbary pirates, conversion was probably a mere formality,” involving little or no obligation of religious practice. Stories of forced circumcision were “a scare tactic designed to discourage potential converts”, not an accurate description of what really happened: “Because Christians … did not practise circumcision … this feature of Islamic custom was viewed with horror as an atavistic ritual performed by barbarians.” [2]

In Mughal India, however, a significant number of the thousands of British soldiers taken prisoner after the Battle of Pollilur in 1780 were later forcibly circumcised by Haidar Ali or his son and successor Tipu Sultan; and an unknown number agreed to convert to Islam in the hope of bettering the conditions of their servitude. One horrified officer wrote in his makeshift diary that they were “terribly alarmed this morning for … [their] foreskin,” while another recorded his feelings of shame in bitter terms: “I lost with the foreskin of my yard all those benefits of a Christian and an Englishman which were and ever shall be my greatest glory.” Colley makes a rare lapse of cultural empathy in describing this admission as “at once comic, tortured and eloquent,” being apparently unaware of the horror with which Europeans regarded circumcision; one cannot imagine her showing such cool detachment were she commenting on the reaction of a victim of clitoridectomy. Elsewhere, however, Colley does appreciate the significance of such a demonstration of raw power by the Sultan, referring to the operation as a “violation”, a “mutilation” and “affront to British masculinity.” The teenage James Bristow and his mates were so distressed at what had been done to them that they caught dogs and bandicoots and circumcised them, knowing that this would incense their captors because Moslems regard dogs as unclean. The action brought further punishment, but Bristow felt it was justified because “compelling us to undergo an abhorred operation [was] so base and barbarous an act of aggression, that it was impossible to reflect on it with temper.” [3]

Colley rightly notes that Islam does not mandate circumcision as a requirement of faith and suggests that Tipu probably intended the operation partly as a sign of his absolute control over the bodies of his prisoners and partly as “a mark of new ownership” and “an indelible symbol of these men’s incorporation into the Mysore state.” Both Colley and Vitkus refer to Freud’s absurd claim that people less sophisticated than he confused circumcision with castration; but their own evidence establishes that there was no such confusion in the minds of captives in North Africa or India. In his discussion of eunuchs in Egypt, Joseph Pitts shows that he was perfectly clear on the difference between the two procedures; and it is evident that the Mysore prisoners also knew exactly what circumcision entailed, and that this knowledge explains both why the prospect appalled them yet also why some were willing to submit to it as the price of securing better treatment. Before most of them were executed as British forces advanced to capture Seringapatam in 1799, some four hundred Britons were still working for Tipu as soldiers in slave battalions, weavers of uniforms, or laborers in the royal mint or on roads and fortifications.

Significance of captives

In the sci-fi adventure Planet of the Apes the extra-terrestrials are persuaded that their human prisoners must be rational beings only when they catch a small animal in their enclosure and keep it in a cage, for only a rational being would keep other animals in captivity. But if caging other animals is a sign of rationality, perhaps it is a characteristic of humanity to lock up and observe members of one’s own species: homo sapiens is the only species known to take its own kind captive; and if Linda Colley is to be believed, this tendency is a major but neglected factor in world history, having an impact far beyond the walls of any prison. In her stimulating and beautifully written study, Colley re-examines the experience of the British Empire from the perspective of the soldiers and minor officials who did the spadework overseas, great numbers of whom were captured by powerful and often cruel enemies in three significant theatres of cultural interaction – the Mediterranean and North Africa, North America, and India – with a concluding excursion into Afghanistan. Throughout the book she scrutinizes received readings and questions many myths, both imperial and anti-imperial.

Far from having been acquired “in a fit of absence of mind,” as Sir John Seeley famously ventured at the height of Victorian self-confidence, the Empire and its future was the topic of constant and often anxious debate, with fears of over-stretch, doubts about the future, and nervous memories of the corruption of Rome and the fall of Ninevah and Tyre. The core of truth in Seeley’s remark is that the British probably did not set out deliberately to acquire a territorial empire; it was the unintended (though in hindsight inevitable) consequence of rivalry with other European powers for trade and trading posts. Colley emphasizes the military limitations of such a small country, the weakness of its armed forces (especially the army) compared with those of its European rivals, and its limited resources compared with those of many of the regimes in the new territories it sought to influence and then govern. She shows convincingly that the British preference for a policy of divide and rule and of relying on the local populations for military and civil tasks was dictated by sheer necessity: the Empire was acquired and managed on a shoestring budget and with a skeleton staff. The red line, she writes in an arresting image, was often anorexic, and in many places held together by teenage boys who today would be still at school or riding skateboards.

Orientalism

Post-colonialist accounts are also dissected with polite but telling intelligence. Colley acknowledges the seductiveness of the orientalist case, particularly Edward Said’s eloquent argument that Europeans have stereotyped Arab and Islamic societies as mysterious, superstitious, backward, feminine, and stagnant, but counters with the observation that European attitudes were quite diverse and changed over time. The principal arena for the Christian encounter with Islam was the Mediterranean, where (until the 1760s) it was strong and Britain weak. The Ottomans had powerful navies and held strategic positions; Britain could not prevent its subjects from being captured and sold into slavery, and did not have the strength to rescue them. Morocco’s standing army was many times the size of Britain’s. In order to protect its vital bases at Gibraltar and Minorca, her majesty’s government paid protection money to the rulers of Algiers and Morocco, and it relied on North Africa to supply food to its garrisons. Thus we see the surprising picture of English slaves in Algiers or Tangier visiting the English consul in those places to try to arrange a ransom and occasionally (though this was dangerous for all concerned) an escape. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was Europeans who were more likely to be feminised, violated, and penetrated, especially by Moslem captors who sold them into slavery, subjected some of them to circumcision, and occasionally forced them to play the passive role in sexual intercourse. No doubt the Christian picture of the sodomitical Turk was part of a demonizing caricature; but the fondness of Middle Eastern and North African men for white youths, especially if blond, is attested to this day by many a satisfied European and American sex-tourist. [4] As Joseph Pitts noted in the eighteenth century: “men, women and children would flock to see me, and I was much admired for having flaxen hair and being of a ruddy complexion. I heard one of them say, ‘Behold! What a pretty maid it is’.” It is hard to believe that he did not receive sexual attentions, though he does not mention any in his reticent narrative.

Perhaps the most significant long-term contrast between the Christian and Moslem worlds, the importance of which has recently been stressed by several western scholars anxious to make sense of the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism [5], is that while the West showed a lot of interest in the East, the latter did not reciprocate, or not to the same degree. Where Europeans from the seventeenth century onwards displayed a lively curiosity about Islamic history and culture, established chairs of Arabic studies, travelled East and wrote detailed accounts of what they found, the Ottomans were relatively contemptuous of and indifferent to the infidel world and did not admit that there was much they could learn from it. Joseph Pitts recorded that the pious Algerians he encountered were “ignorant of astronomy and hold it to be a great piece of arrogance and profaneness for any to dive into these things which belong to that science. And they moreover say that no man in the world knows when the new moon is, but God alone knows. And they say that none but Christians will inquire into such hidden and abstruse matters.” It is probable that had Pitts been traveling in Europe and meeting pious Christians they would have made much the same sort of comment, and it is possible that he was pandering to a perception of what his English audience wished to hear about Islamic benightedness. In former times Arabic mathematicians and astronomers had been far in advance of their European counterparts, and their sea captains must have known enough about celestial navigation to steer their ships. (Or was the loss of such knowledge a reason why North African rulers sought European sailors?)

Islam posed as thorny a dilemma for Western progressives and radicals in the eighteenth century as it does today. Some, stressing its secular strength and the power of its clerics, denounced it as a variety of theological despotism even worse than that found in backward parts of Europe. Others, stressing its spiritual side, admired it as a purified and simple faith, free from idolatry, superstition and priests, more akin to Deism than an organized religion. [6] Today progressive thinkers are similarly divided between those with sympathy for Islamic regimes and movements as the only forces that seem capable of resisting the advance of US-dominated global capitalism, and those who see such forces as both immediately oppressive and threatening a tyranny as bad as Stalin’s communism or the nightmare world imagined in Margaret Atwood’s Orwellian dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale.

The ambiguities of “otherness”

In her own discussion of such issues, Colley points out that, for the protestant English, the chief “other” was not Islam but Catholicism. The early captivity narratives collected by Vitkus describe far worse cruelty and oppression at the hands of Spanish or Genoese captors, who reportedly tortured Protestant refugees in the hope of forcing them to embrace the true faith, than from Moslem owners in North Africa, who were more interested in getting steady work or a fat ransom out of them. John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1685, published 1689) advocated toleration for Jews and Moslems, but probably not for Catholics and certainly not for atheists. [7] The English contempt for poverty, despotism, superstition, and backwardness, so characteristic of eighteenth-century consciousness of nationhood, applied far more often to Catholic Europe, especially Britain’s great rivals, France and Spain, than to the Islamic world. For their part, by the 1750s prominent Catholic intellectuals were concerned that Deists and spiriti forti (freethinkers) were greater threats to Christianity than Islam and Judaism combined [7A] – and they were of course right.

Belittling Moslem societies was by no means a universal tendency, and there are many examples of a counter trend to hold up the Ottoman or Persian empires as models of enlightenment and good government that Europeans would do well to emulate. Familiar examples include Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, Voltaire’s Zadig, and Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, in which the Pasha turns out to be an exemplar of humanity and justice. Perhaps such comparisons reflect both ignorance of real conditions and the perception, by the late eighteenth century, that the Ottomans were no longer dangerous, or perhaps the tendency for the dissidents of one country to appeal to the example of any enemy of their own rulers when arguing the need for reform; but it would seem that the orientalist caricature of the Islamic world did not emerge until the second half of the nineteenth century, more likely as a reflection of European domination than as a cause of or justification for it. Orientalism began as a genuine curiosity about the cultures and societies of the East and out of the impulse to know more about them – exemplified by scholarly figures such as Sir William Jones, who learned Indian languages and founded the Asiatick Society of Bengal in 1784. The absence of a correspondingly vigorous “Occidentalism” on the part of eastern intellectuals has much to do with the later characterization of oriental societies as incurious and backward-looking, rather like Europe itself in the Dark Ages.

It was the more popular works of lower or middlebrow culture that tended to embody the orientalist typecasting in its full colors – the novels of H. Rider Haggard or G. A. Henty, the ambiguous examples of Kipling, or Arthur Conan Doyle’s oddly topical story, The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898), recently republished by a small English press. This is a most hackneyed and predictable adventure tale about a party of tourists on a Nile steamer who are kidnapped by “Dervishes” (the Islamic extremists of the 1890s). The villains first intend to hold them for ransom, but this plan is frustrated by transport difficulties in the desert. They then threaten to shoot their captives, but they delay their doom by professing an interest in conversion, which the Mufti traveling with the band is eager to accommodate. The Europeans are soon rescued by a British military detachment in an episode that highlights how far the writing of thrillers has improved in the past hundred years. The most interesting passages of the book, and the only reason to read it (apart from some witty character sketches), are the exchanges concerning international politics between the retired English colonel and “a good natured but argumentative Frenchman” who held the most decided views about the deep machinations of British diplomacy and the illegality of Britain’s position in Egypt. French subtlety over the dialectics of imperial reach and military intervention does not seem to have declined over the past century. There is also a remarkably relevant discussion between the colonel and an American about the white man’s burden and whether the United States would indeed step in, as the colonel thought it should, to play the civilizing, modernizing, and order-keeping role, normally played by Britain, in regions then beyond the lion’s reach.

American War of Independence

Crossing to another hemisphere, Colley’s discussion of captivity in North America covers not only the narratives of settlers abducted by Indians, but the experience of all those who fought in the many conflicts among French, Spanish, British, and colonists about who would rule the territories that eventually became the United States and Canada; and Colley adds new dimensions to our understanding of the American War of Independence, particularly the significance of prisoners in the propaganda aspect of that struggle. In the early stages of colonization Indian defeats were related to divisions among the tribes, which allowed British and French forces to ally with one or other against their rivals in a complex play of shifting partnerships that was not possible in the Mediterranean but was pretty much replicated in India. At the same time, the demands of European commitments meant that Britain did not permanently station a large body of troops in America until after the Seven Years War, and they were not intended to assist the settlers in subduing Indians so much as to contain frontier conflict and keep settlers and Indians apart. Lack of funds stymied the plan to send a force of 10,000, and by the 1770s there were only some 4,500 troops to cover the entire vast expanse from Florida to Canada. The British were not racially exclusivist, and their policy of protecting Indian lands in the west annoyed the colonists: as a consequence, in the War of Independence, more support for Britain came from Indians, Negroes, and other racial minorities than from British Americans.

Colley has a brilliant and fascinating discussion of the ambiguities of identity in this conflict and the importance of captives in the war of words, particularly the American endeavor to portray the British as cruel and, therefore, foreign – that is, like savage Indians. The war resulted in the taking of thousands of captives by both sides and the birth of the idea that a nation’s decency was to be measured by how it treated them. In their propaganda the rebels emphasized British cruelty to prisoners, thus casting doubt upon Britain’s credibility among the enlightened circles of Europe and enhancing the justice of the patriot cause. Although rebel treatment of British prisoners was much the same, the British did not want to talk about the suffering of their own POWs because it was humiliating for the imperial mother to admit that so many of her children had been taken. The outcome of these manoeuvres was that, in the West, kind treatment of captives came to be one of the most important criteria by which to judge a nation’s fairness in waging a war and, thereby, its civilized status in general. Subsequently, the alarm bells would ring every time a new and non-subscribing military culture was encountered, such as the Japanese in the Second World War, who reacted to European surrenders in much the same way as the Indians had: as a disgraceful abrogation of manliness that deserved punishment.

To an Australian, such tales of captivity and escape have a particularly strong resonance. Modern Australia began, in Robert Hughes’ provocative expression, as a Gulag for Britain after the loss of its American colonies [8], and the remote and inhospitable land was a prison for convicts and gaolers alike for many years. Rivaling the myth of Australia’s noble defeat at Gallipoli, Australia’s predominant wartime memories are the stories of captivity (occasionally including escape) from the Pacific War, particularly the ordeal of POWs on the Thailand-Burma railway and as slave laborers for the Japanese in other parts of east Asia. Confirming Colley’s insight that the Seven Years War consolidated treatment of prisoners as the western benchmark for assessing how civilized a nation is, Australian attitudes to the Japanese were soured for two generations by the conviction that they had treated the POWs with brutal inhumanity.

Fractured Islam in India

The Christian-Moslem encounter was never a confrontation of pure essences. Even in the Mediterranean, Christians were divided by national and sectarian allegiances and fought as much among themselves as against the Turk; for many Christians, the main enemy could be Catholic, Protestant, atheist, or sceptic. In India these polymorphous and fracturing tendencies were magnified many times over. A traditional polytheism, later codified as Hinduism, held its own locally against Moslem monotheism; but Islam itself was riven by the great Sunni-Shi’ite division, and the Sunni Mughals had no empathy with the Shi’ite heretics to the south. In the eyes of strict Persian purists, Islam as practiced at Hyderabad or Mysore was heavily contaminated by Hindu superstition. One emigre recorded his disgust at the Hindus’ blatant joy in sex and at people who removed neither their pubic hair nor the foreskins of their boys, and he was shocked that children of mixed marriages were left to choose their own religion as they matured. From the west came Portuguese and French Catholics and, later, English Protestants, followed in the eighteenth century by British who were scarcely Christian at all, but sceptical adherents of Enlightenment Deism. They held that human nature was pretty much the same everywhere and were open to other cultures, the worth of which they judged pragmatically on the basis of their contribution to individual happiness and social well-being, rather in the utilitarian manner implied by the words of the wise Tahitian in Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage (quoted in the epigraph). They disapproved of religious fanaticism and would have agreed with the sort of detachment shown by Edward Gibbon in his celebrated characterization of religious life under the Roman Empire: “The various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world were all considered by the people as equally true; by the philosopher as equally false; and by the magistrate as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.” [9]

Europeans in India

Such diversity was pretty close to the situation the early European arrivals encountered in India. They were not conquerors or missionaries, but traders who wanted to make money through exchanges profitable to both parties. The missionaries came later, intent on restoring purity of faith and demarcating believer from non-believer: Jesuit priests intended to keep the Portuguese in line; and British parsons disapproved mightily of the lax, idolatrous, and sometimes polygamous habits of so many East India Company employees. Writing back from Portuguese Goa in 1560, one Jesuit official stated that “the Inquisition is more necessary in these parts than anywhere else, since all the Christians here live together with the Muslims, the Jews and the Hindus, and this causes laxness of conscience. … Only with the curb of the Inquisition will they lead a good life.” In similar vein, an English missionary denounced the “brahminised British” of the 1780s-1820s in his indignant tract, The Government Connection with Idolatry in India (1851): “The chief officers of the Government [sic] belonged to a peculiar class. … [They] were on the whole an irreligious body of men; who approved of Hinduism much more than Christianity, and favoured the Koran more than the Bible. Some hated Missions from their dread of sedition; and others because their hearts ‘seduced by fair idolatresses, had fallen for idols foul’.” Among other lessons, the research in Colley’s Captives and in William Dalrymple’s enthralling saga, White Mughals (from which these revealing quotations are taken), confirms the validity of Jane Jacobs’ suggestion that warrior or administrative cultures are characterized by values such as exertion of power, deception, revenge, and respect for hierarchy, tradition, and discipline; while commercial cultures nurture qualities like honesty, voluntary agreements, collaboration with strangers, dissent, respect for contracts, openness to novelty, and rejection of force. [10] Much of British-Indian history from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century might be interpreted as the sad process by which the former syndrome conquered the latter.

Anti-racism of the Enlightenment

Under the influence of the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment – and before the rise of territorial imperialism, evangelical Christianity, and racism in the mid-nineteenth century – there was a blending of cultures in India: British officials of the East India Company adopted local customs, dress, food, and lifestyle and formed sexual liaisons (both solemnized and otherwise) with local women (and sometimes surreptitiously, as Ronald Hyam reminds us, with local men and boys). [11] Many of these were captivated rather than captured by their hosts, like Gulliver by the Houyhnhnms, and “went native” to varying degrees. Before company policy put a stop to the trend, British India was on the road to becoming a Creole society. Some of these went back to England as the atmosphere chilled and made a living by preparing curries for other returned India hands who were homesick for their adopted native land and found England itself a place of exile. India offered two main religious choices for those willing to drift away from Christian certainties. William Gardner married a Moslem princess, and his son a grand daughter of the Emperor Aurungzeb; and although it eventually inherited the Gardner barony, the family elected to remain in the East. Major General Charles Stuart, a somewhat mysterious Irishman who arrived in the 1780s while still a teenager, turned to polytheism, published several defences of Hindu customs and culture and became known as “Hindoo Stuart.” He built a temple at Saugor and when he visited Europe took statues of his favourite Hindu gods with him. Other prominent figures who similarly went native were Sir David Ochterlonie, the British resident at Delhi, and General William Palmer, envoy to the Hindu Marathas, who was eventually removed by the Governor-General, Richard Wellesley, for excessive sympathy with the Indians. Another product of this hybrid milieu was James Brooke, born in 1803 to an old EIC family in Bengal. Rejecting EIC employment himself, he pressed further east and became the founder of another cross-cultural political entity, the white rajahs of Sarawak. [12] Many of these characters practiced polygamy, and some accumulated quite large harems in the true style of a local grandee. One EIC employee was believed to have no fewer than sixteen concubines; when asked what he did with them all, he replied: “Oh, I just give them a little rice and let them run around”. So much for the mystique of the seraglio.

As this easy-going mood gave way to the conservative reaction against the French Revolution, the imposition of puritan views on sex, an evangelical style of Christianity, and an ethnocentric view of British superiority, so British policy in India underwent a decisive transformation. From operating as a commercial enterprise with only a limited and incidental interest in the acquisition of territory, the EIC became a major political force with a large army at its command (staffed mostly by native Indians, as Colley stresses), and determined to rule as well as trade. David Ochterlonie registered the changing mood around 1800, not using a term like racism, but regretting the sudden appearance of “ill nature” and “illiberal prejudices” among senior British officials. As Governor-General, Wellesley was committed to eliminating the presence of the French, whom he suspected of radical, republican, and Jacobin sympathies; what sealed Tipu’s fate was not his treatment of British captives, but his alliance with revolutionary France, Britain’s major antagonist after 1790, and especially following Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798, from where an invasion to liberate India was feared.

James Kirkpatrick, white Mughal

Caught up in and exemplifying this momentous transformation, with its implications for every aspect of British-Indian life, from strategic policy to dinner parties, were James Achilles Kirkpatrick, EIC envoy to the Nizam of Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805, and his secret bride Khair un-Nissa, youngest daughter of an important aristocratic family connected with the court. British concern at the possibility that Kirkpatrick had “turned Turk” (he had reportedly embraced Islam in order to marry Khair in accordance with Moslem forms) was heightened by alarm at the large number of Tipu’s captives who had gone over to his side. Whose interests would Kirkpatrick serve? William Dalrymple’s engrossing account of Kirkpatrick’s life offers many pleasures, including the genealogical complexity of the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic intrigues of Salman Rushdie’s Shame, and two star-crossed lovers torn apart by mistrust between their respective societies and more particularly, by the angry, jealous, and exclusivist males of Khair’s family and the EIC executive. A moving personal story is firmly situated within the context of the grand commercial and increasingly territorial aspirations of the EIC, encompassing a panorama of princes, begums, zenanas, female power, money, riches beyond belief, colorful ceremonies, landscapes, cities, gardens, architecture, portraits, affection, fraternal rivalries and jealousy, as well as love, birth, death – and even taxes. It is a story as teeming with detail as the streets of India itself. The scholarship is impressive throughout, and the author has made use of materials in Indian languages not often consulted by Western scholars; he has also translated local and contemporary accounts that offer crucial details or telling insights, has used hitherto unexamined letters from women, and speculated intelligently in places where the evidence peters out. As an aesthetic bonus the book is beautifully illustrated and is written in a style accessible to the general reader.

One of the most interesting themes to emerge from the narrative is the remarkable initiative of yet another class of captives, this time native ones – the women of Baqar Ali Khan’s zenana. The eagerness and skill with which Khair un-Nissa’s mother and grandmother plotted to defeat the schemes of the family males and link up with the rising British power show a high degree of dissatisfaction with Persian/Islamic patriarchy and a shrewd awareness that better hopes for prosperity and greater freedom lay with the newcomers. At a broader level it indicates both the rigidity and flexibility of Mughal culture and the greater adaptability of the British before the Enlightenment idea of a universal human nature was replaced by the racist categories characteristic of the imperial high noon. The religious scepticism of the period encouraged people like Kirkpatrick to regard Islam as no more false than Christianity; to marry Khair he would probably have embraced any religion at all, even Catholicism. For her part, Khair always stressed that she had fallen in love with the handsome officer from the moment she glimpsed him from behind the curtain, but the marriage offered significant material advantages as well – rescue from the unattractive cousin her grandfather wanted her to marry, avoidance of a bossy mother-in-law, the security of monogamy, greater opportunities for her children, and an escape from purdah. Although Kirkpatrick built her a pavilion in the garden of the magnificent official residence he erected in Hyderabad, there is no question that she was free to go where she pleased: indeed, after his death she travelled and took a lover in a manner sharply at variance with the customs of her people. In the context of captivity and escape narratives, Khair might be seen as engineering her escape from the prison of Islamic patriarchy, her very own Entfuhrung aus dem Serail.

The sad melodrama of James Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa strikingly illustrates Richard Dawkins’ argument that the human body is like a vehicle by which DNA achieves its desire to travel and mingle. [13] We are all mongrels, both genetically and culturally, and the more we mix our genes and memes (Dawkins’ word for transmissible cultural constructs) and in the process modify our phenotype and social practices, the healthier and more interesting we become. Against this inexorable process stand the identity commissars, with their obsession with various forms of purity, whether racial, religious, cultural, social, or familial: the Jesuits of the Inquisition who condemned (and terrorized) the Portuguese traders at Goa, the British evangelicals who deplored the adoption of Indian dress and customs, the official who demolished the pavilion Kirkpatrick built for Khair because it smacked of “native immorality,” the Islamic clerics who urged the faithful to avoid contact with the infidel, and the jealous males of Khair’s family who wailed that their honor had been besmirched and their religion insulted and who seized her property and warned that she would be killed if she returned home. Khair’s mother cursed religious distinctions and prayed that people could be free to follow the inclination of their hearts; as she explained to Dr. Kennedy, who had been sent to investigate rumors of the affair: “I wish he [Kirkpatrick] had her in the same manner as he might have had her before the Distinctions introduced by Moosa [Moses], Issa [Jesus] and Mahomed were known in the world.” In recognizing that such ideological distinctions had little to do with the health and happiness of flesh-and-blood beings, this closeted eighteenth-century Mughal woman was far ahead of her time.

8. The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (London: Harper Collins, 1987).

9. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chap. 2., p. 165.

10. Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), pp. 23-24. Jacobs identifies two sets of values, which she calls the “guardian syndrome” and the “commercial syndrome.”

11. Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 126-33.

12. J.H. Walker, Power and Prowess: The Origins of Brooke Kingship in Sarawak (Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the University of Hawaii Press, 2002), esp. p. 30.